3. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Technology has played a very vital part within every stage of our project,

One of these was the internet. The internet was very beneficial during our research and planning stages as it allowed us to analyse existing music videos and real media products of our chosen genre, in a really efficient way. By using websites such as 'You Tube', we were able to view large numbers of music videos with in short spaces of time, and this was really beneficial to us as it allowed our general time keeping of the project to remain on track. The internet also allowed us to help learn more on our target audience and gain direct opinions from them through social networking sites, such as blog’s, Facebook and Twitter, this was highly beneficial to us, as it allowed to come up with more ideas of how our music video should look, and ways in which to make it more successful by creating something that would really appeal to our target audience by finding out what they really wanted in a music video to what they didn’t.

Another piece of technology that became very useful to us was Blogger! It was a really great way for us to display all of our work and to show the stages of the project, and how each developed over time. It also allowed us too see in a really clear way how we were getting on, and the ability to always be able to look back at our research and plans in order for us to keep on the track we had wanted rather than steering off course.

PowerPoint presentation software proved very beneficial when presenting our work in a very clear and organised way. It avoided our blog’s becoming to 'wordy' and allowed us to use our new skills we had learned through creating slideshows.

The filming cameras were of course, one of the key elements of our project. Our use of them and the skills we have with them have developed massively, as for myself and Jess, the use of the cameras were quite new to us, as in our AS pieces we had both chosen to create magazine covers using digital cameras. Jess was the 'artist' for our music video, and therefore I filmed all of the footage. Jess was really helpful in helping me set up all of the shots and worked with me to plan out the ways the shots would be set and what would be involved with in them.

We used the digital cameras to capture the images for our ancillary tasks. For this we were able to use the skills we had learnt over the AS part of the course.

The last stages of our project highly involved the editing software on the editing machines. This programme is called Adobe Premiere. It was a completely new experience for Jess as she had never used the software before, and i had only had little experience with it during my media studies GCSE. Therefore it took us a while to get used too. However once we got the hang of it, it became vital to the really creating the overall music video, it helped us to really shape it and to add in 'cuts' and effects to make it look like a real music video. It also allowed us to correct any errors we had made whilst filming, such as cropping shots that people had accidentally walked in to shot, and brightening up shots we had filmed that were too dark.

When creating the ancillary tasks, we used the 'Adobe Photoshop' software. Hess had had alot of experience with this, and was really good at showing me how to use it also. We used it to edit our images for our CD cover, inserts and magazine advertisements. We were able to use tools to create different fonts, backgrounds, and layouts which all reflected both the indie pop genre and the look of the actual existing products.

The fact that majourity of the equipemnent and technology we used was digital, was a hightly benefical factor to us. During the ancillary task, when taking the images on the digital camera, was a really quick and effcient process. We were able to capture the images, and view them on the back of the camera so that we could view whether they were what we wanted, before uploading them and realising this later, which would have meant we would have had to performed a re-shoot. It also meant that we could take a large number of images on the SD cards and place that straight in to the computers and store them ready for use later. This was a really quick process and allowed us to continue with the project within great time.

This was very similar to when we used the recording cameras to film the shots for our music video. We were able to watch the clips back after filming, which allowed us to see if we needed to re-do the shot, or if we we had what we needed.

A final aspect of this was being able to upload our ancillary task pieces and our final music video on to social networking sites, where we were able to recieve direct feedback from our audiences. This is something that professional artists do in the present day.

Without Web 2.0 and all of the digital equipment, we would not have been able to do some things, and our entire process would have been a lot more time consuming.